One of the areas of review is ’employment law hearing structures’, in respect of which the report says (paras 2.14-16):

The Civil Courts Structure Review led by Briggs LJ noted that there is an “awkwardarea” of shared and exclusive jurisdiction in the fields of discrimination and employment law, which has generated boundary issues between the courts and the Employment Tribunal System (the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeals Tribunal). As sui generis entities, both employment tribunals sit “uncomfortably stranded between the Civil Courts and the main Tribunal Service”. These issues are well known amongst employment law experts, judges and practitioners; they can cause delay and can also prevent cases being determined by the judges best equipped to handle them.Read the rest of this entry »

The order and explanatory notes say that reimbursement of fees and, importantly, applications for reinstatement of claims will be dealt with (where necessary) according to administrative procedures to be announced shortly.

Back in October 2012 I wrote about the case of Simmons v Castle and its implications for employment law.

In Simmons v Castle the Court of Appeal applied a general 10% uplift to “general damages”. There was no mention of compensation for injury to feelings in employment tribunal discrimination claims, but my conclusion at the time was that “it looks a lot like the effect of Simmons v Castle is also to raise compensation for injury to feelings in discrimination claims … by 10%.” Read the rest of this entry »

The new online database of employment tribunal judgments has now been live for around three weeks.

In that time it has been consistently and regularly updated. It appears that anything that counts as a “judgment” is uploaded, which includes simple records of withdrawals as well as more substantial decisions.

It is possible to subscribe to email or RSS updates for the database, but with many new judgments being added daily it is beyond even the most dedicated researcher to follow all the new decisions.

There are, though, more selective ways of being updated. For instance, if you are interested in any new TUPE decisions, you can select the TUPE jurisdiction from the drop down menu. If you do that, you will get a list of all the TUPE cases. At the top of that list, the “feed” item is now limited only to TUPE cases. By subscribing to that RRS feed through a feed reader such as Feedly you can then get notified only of any new TUPE cases. Unfortunately it does not seem as though this works for email updates, so has to be done via RSS, which is a little more technical. Read the rest of this entry »